No Liberal: Hillary Is Pro Multinational and Pro Military-Industrial Complex

By Daily Bell Staff - July 14, 2016

That’s why I pledge that in my first 100 days as president, we will make the biggest investment in new good-paying jobs since World War II. We need more jobs you can support a family on, especially in places that have been left out and left behind, from Coal Country, to Indian Country, to inner cities, to every place that has been hollowed out when a factory closed or a mine shut down. –Recent Hillary Speech from TIME magazine

TIME magazine among other publications gives Hillary Clinton a lot of positive coverage. It recently reproduced a full speech of hers which dealt mostly with “unification and community,” two favorite themes of hers.

But in this article, we’ll show clearly that Hillary is pro-multinational and pro-military-industrial complex. Those are her main planks, even if she rarely talks about them.

The speech as presented by TIME provides us with a vision of Hillary as a peaceful person whose main focus as president will be the greater good of America’s poor and middle-classes.

The propaganda surrounding Hillary’s political stances is much different than the truth.

In fact an analysis of the “big investment” Hillary plans shows that the investment will be made via taxing trillions in offshore revenue.

In a June post at the Intercept entitled, “Hillary Clinton Hints at Giant, Trump-Like Giveaway to Corporate America,” Jon Schwarz analyzes plans for Hillary’s big investment and concludes it will be paid for by aggressive tax reductions on multinationals.

[Here speech] was full of Bernie Sanders-like rhetoric about “outrageous behavior” by business and Wall Street. But it also included a dog whistle that only huge multinational corporations would hear, telling them that she plans to deliver on one of their greatest dreams and slash their longterm taxes by hundreds of billions of dollars.

The heart of this plan will be an “infrastructure bank … that will bring private sector dollars off the sidelines and put them to work here.”

But where would the money come from? Schwarz suggests it might come in taxes from trillions the nation’s largest corporations have stored overseas.

Congress granted corporations a tax holiday in 2004 that let them bring back their profits at a tax rate of about 5 percent, or one-seventh of what the normal tax law required. Clinton, then a senator from New York, voted for it.

The incentives haven’t changed since then, so profits held overseas by U.S. multinationals have accumulated again and have now reached an incredible $2.4 trillion. That’s about 65 percent of the 2015 federal budget and 13 percent of the entire U.S. economy.

The law Hillary is apparently contemplating would tax corporations whether or not they repatriated funds, but would also radically reduce their taxes.

Clinton has been vague about these plans but, meeting in April with the New York Daily News editorial board she indicated infrastructure money “may be [acquired by] repatriation.”

Schwarz also quotes her as saying, she intends to bring “private sector dollars off the sidelines and put them to work here.”

That phrase — bringing corporate money “off the sidelines” — is a favorite of both Democratic and Republican elites to describe slashing the tax rate on overseas profits.

Hillary intends to repatriate this revenue by making a deal with transnational corporations that have legally kept their profits offshore.

She wants to change the law to gain access to some of that revenue and then intends to use that revenue to fund infrastructure efforts and other forms of job creation.

The ability to unlock this offshore revenue is one reason why she is confident she will be able to work with Republicans in the House and Senate – as they would like to gain access to those funds as well.

Most importantly, however, the deal will enhance the functionality of transnational corporations. They will be able to operate more normally since they can brings funds back to the US.

There are other ways that Clinton intends to support the nation’s largest multinationals.

Despite rhetorical opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, she won’t oppose it, per Robert Reich, Bill Clinton’s former Secretary of Labor.

He recently revealed a conversation with a Clinton advisor that he placed on his Facebook page.

The advisor told Reich Clinton would not oppose President Obama on the TPP but that she had already shielded herself from repercussions by formally opposing it.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) gives corporations the ability to bypass domestic courts and directly “sue” governments via a new tribunal of private judges empowered by the agreement.

The lawsuits could be brought if a corporation believed the nation in question was enforcing laws that were unreasonably detrimental to its businesses.

Clinton is pro multinational and she is also a covert (and sometimes overt) proponent of the military industrial complex.

This is even evident to liberal publications. Here, from the Huffington Post in February, “Hillary Is the Candidate of the War Machine.”

Her so-called foreign policy “experience” has been to support every war demanded by the US deep security state run by the military and the CIA.

Hillary is a staunch neocon whose record of favoring American war adventures explains much of our current security danger.

Hilary was a staunch defender of the military-industrial-intelligence complex at every turn, helping to spread the Iraq mayhem over a swath of violence that now stretches from Mali to Afghanistan.

Two disasters loom largest: Libya and Syria. Hillary has been much attacked for the deaths of US diplomats in Benghazi, but her tireless promotion of the overthrow Muammar Qaddafi by NATO bombing is the far graver disaster.

She is a supporter of NATO expansion and voted to include Georgia and Ukraine in NATO in 2008 legislation. She is anti-Russian now and supports the emerging standoff, and worse, between Russia and NATO and the US.

When you examine Clinton’s policies closely, you will see they do not depart from Obama’s or even Bush’s. She intends to fully support the two pillars of elite American imperialism: Transnational corporations and the military-industrial complex.

We’ve already pointed out numerous times that absent Supreme Court laws on intellectual property and corporate personhood the country’s large multinationals would not exist.

And absent the US military industrial complex, the US would not be involved in an endless series of foreign wars.

Conclusion: Under Hillary, things won’t change, though doubtless they will get worse. That is why she has the support of the US power structure, and why she was not indicted.

You don’t have to play by the rules of the corrupt politicians, manipulative media, and brainwashed peers.

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